During the final night of the GOP convention, Donald Trump spewed enough bullshit to keep the White House south lawn fertilized in perpetuity. He also made it clear how thoroughly he has mowed down his party and regrown it in his image; the south lawn may as well have been the fairway of one of his golf courses at the conclusion of a convention that featured more Trumps than Republican senators. Attendees gathered shoulder to shoulder, flouting social distancing rules established for a pandemic they were determined to portray as being over. As Susan B. Glasser explains in The New Yorker, “The real message of the evening was that nothing, not even a deadly plague or a cratering economy, can stop Trump from being Trump. He bragged. He lied. He even ad-libbed a taunt at his critics, using the White House as his prop. ‘We’re here,’ he said, pointing to the flood-lit mansion behind him, ‘and they’re not.'” (Amy Klobuchar had the line of the night: “Get off our lawn.” (Sadly, he’s not gonna just sod off.)

+ McCay Coppins in The Atlantic: “Americans who tuned in to this week’s Republican National Convention were treated to a slickly produced, four-day dispatch from an alternate reality—one in which the president has defeated the pandemic, healed America’s racial wounds, and ushered in a booming economy. In this carnival of propaganda, Donald Trump was presented not just as a great president, but as a quasi-messianic figure who was single-handedly preventing the nation’s slide into anarchy.” A Carnival of Disinformation. (And like most carnival rides, it was intended not to convince, but to disorient. Did it work? We don’t know yet, but for tens of millions of voters, it’s been working for years.)

+ And what’s a golf course-like setting without a good lie. Or a few hundred of them. Watch Daniel Dale fact-check Trump’s address. The speech went on so long and was so exhausting that I found myself ordering a My Pillow.